When the pandemic first hit a year and a half ago, Vodafone found itself with a branding challenge: The public health disaster rapidly spreading across the world cast the company’s tagline—”The Future Is Exciting. Ready?”—in a new light.
At Adweek’s Social Media Week London event, the telecom’s global head of brand and communications, Ebru Ozguc, spoke with Adweek editor in chief Stephanie Paterik about how Vodafone’s articulated sense of purpose helped it chart a course through uncertain times and build a new brand vision around a community-oriented slogan: “Together We Can.”
“It was a moment in every brand or brand leader’s career when you’re hit with such a big change in the market, a global pandemic, which no one saw coming. And all of a sudden, the future had no meaning,” Ozguc said. “The first thing we did was we dropped ‘The future’s exciting’ from our tagline because I don’t think anyone thought there was anything exciting.”
Vodafone had long struck an optimistic note with its brand messaging, but such positivity no longer seemed as appropriate in a moment of global foreboding. Ozguc said the team had to work quickly to establish a new vision that tapped into that same sense of optimism but tempered it with the realities of the world at the time.
“The key question was, ‘How do you keep the optimism in the brand, but also continue to be relevant to your audience?'” she said. “So the tagline that we came up with, together with our stakeholders, was ‘Together We Can.’ It still had the optimism, but it was a manifestation of heart, how technology is working to the benefit of the human spirit, and making sure that we are not led by technology but leading with technology, supporting us as we see fit.”
Ozguc said there were a few main factors that made it possible for the company to work quickly and purposefully. One was that the entire process was handled transparently, with input from those involved at every level. Another was consumer research; the brand undertook extensive efforts to get a sense of how the consumer base felt at the time and what they wanted.
Vodafone also looked to thread a guiding sense of purpose throughout the entire process, ensuring diversity in the team responsible for the push and crafting small business support and sustainability guidelines.
“It’s made us elevate the brand purpose at every level of the organization,” Ozguc said. “We’ve really seen that purpose needs to be the thread in everything you do, in every customer interaction. It’s not just one campaign, one launch. It should be in every promise.”
SOURCE : adweek
